


Nekyia

by weatherfront



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 05:16:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14181603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weatherfront/pseuds/weatherfront
Summary: Yusuf is starting over, Eames is waiting to see what happens next, and Arthur is trying to figure out how to talk to the dead.





	Nekyia

**Author's Note:**

> Hiya! Here is a new thing. There are many excuses I would like to make for it and many disclaimers I would like to shout from the mountaintops, but that would be super tedious so let's NOT DO THAT. Perhaps the only three even remotely important pieces of information are: 1. I don't know what this is either, 2. I don't know how long it will be either, and 3. I'm at [16ruedelaverrerie](http://16ruedelaverrerie.tumblr.com) on tumblr so come on over and chat, I always love to chat!

 

## 1.

Yusuf stood amid the bodies and considered the merits of lying to himself. People always made it sound so easy, didn't they, but maybe he just didn't have the knack for it. _This isn't what I wanted_ seemed too childish a sentiment, and _this isn't what I expected_ was just flat-out insulting. Of course he had expected it. He'd built this empire for himself.

Beneath his canopies of tubing, two dozen incandescent swells of light, conquest had lost all its erstwhile sweetness. Yusuf checked the timer on the PASIV -- twenty hours under, vitals steady -- and dipped his fingers into the Vaseline. Wandering his basement like a gravekeeper, making sure his customers kept breathing, that their lips didn't crack and bleed. Ice chips in the refrigerator for when they woke up parched. Twenty hours under, vitals steady. Years back, when the novelty of the venture was still with him, four seemed as many as anyone could ever want.

 _When we first learned to walk our dreams,_ he thought, _it felt like breaking wild horses. Like taming oceans. We stepped out onto unclaimed land and thought that it would set us free._ And yet, here they were on the other side of triumph, shackles around their own wrists. Bedridden for days at the mercy of the needle. The monuments he thought he'd raised were only heaps of rubble from closer up, a slack ruin of bodies-- and maybe the fault was his, for promising them milk and honey in a vial of witch hazel. They ran ashore to find themselves nowhere close to Canaan. He'd done this to them, instead. Just gotten them tangled up, breathing fitfully in comatose unison, tied into knots like a listless rat king. It was exactly what he had wanted and exactly what he had expected, to tell himself the truth. He was sick of it.

So: fingertips still slick with Vaseline, Yusuf tore down the world map pinned to the far wall of his basement den, scattering thumbtacks and Post-it notes across the floor. Good riddance to his business contacts, to hell with his expansion plans. It was the year of the undoing.

 

 

# { n e k y i a }

 

 

"I'm fairly certain he's gone mad," says Eames. "I asked him, _You do realize you're hacking your life's work to bits--_ do you know what he said? _What, and let someone else have the fun of it?_ Then he pulled down his goggles and whirred away on some sort of monstrous hand-cobbled centrifuge until the din drove me from the room."

"Don't let him hear you cast aspersions on his sanity," says Arthur. "We might have free rein here in my head, but topside, I know who signs my paycheck."

"Your loyalty is touching," says Eames. Then, like an afterthought, "If you had your pay docked for cheek, you'd never have seen a red cent from me. Especially not after Fortaleza."

Arthur concentrates on the hairpin bend ahead, turns the steering wheel and lets the car glide through it, near skimming the crooked guardrail lacing its edge. _Is that the right phrase, a red cent_ , Eames is saying, like he doesn't know.

(Fortaleza. He ran point for Eames on a four-person stroll through a logistician's head, left the city with bruises on his hips and Eames's passport in his pocket. The bruises were a better souvenir; the passport was because it seemed like the sort of thing they did with each other, instead of spending the whole flight back desperately aware of the ache of the seat belt across his hips, thinking objectionable thoughts like _the bruises were a better souvenir_. When Arthur landed and took the call, Eames's voice was lazy over the static. _Your idea of inconveniencing me is to let me loiter another two weeks here?_ )

"You didn't mind it too much," says Arthur.

"No," admits Eames, "but it's the principle of the thing."

(It rained in Fortaleza, first day of the job. _Reminds me of Jakarta,_ said Eames, airing out the collar of his shirt. Arthur hummed in agreement and dog-eared a bill of lading. Later that night, as he shuddered and came, he sank his teeth into Eames's shoulder the way he had in Jakarta; but Jakarta had been ten thousand miles away.)

"What Yusuf mentioned earlier," says Arthur. He fiddles with the tuner on the radio, but the same jazz standard meanders in on every station. "When he talked about Mombasa-- remember that?"

"Oh, you had your jet lag and I had mine," says Eames, "but I think I caught enough. Why?"

(In the kaleidoscope cast of the late afternoon sun through the shelves of his workroom, Yusuf paced as he gave them the technical rundown. _We're training the patients' brains to regain the ability to dream naturally. Reactivating neural pathways, causing lasting changes in neurotransmitter balance to recover autonomous REM sleep. The compound is designed to amplify emotion, but it's the dreamer's subconscious that fleshes out the content of the dream; where it's set, how the emotion manifests. With each iteration of exposure to the compound, the patient's dreams will shift further away from the lucidity associated with induced dreaming--_ until Eames interrupted, _Alright, but why? Why are you doing this,_ jolting Arthur out of his trance.

 _I'm--,_ Yusuf began, then paused to rake a hand through his hair. _I've been here nine years,_ he said, at last. _Maybe that's not as long as it could be, but all the same, this is home. I watch the vacationing crowd drift through the city and I wonder, where do they think they are? Is this just another beach town to them? Some exotic locale? What I mean is-- I'm tired of doing what I don't want them to do, I suppose. Chasing things that just stand in for something else._ )

Ten thousand miles between Jakarta and Fortaleza, and all they saw was the mottle of rain on the windows as the sheets tangled around their feet. Arthur thinks he might understand what Yusuf was getting at. They'd sailed their way to unknown coasts, to claim a world they thought was theirs to chart. But what did it mean to cross the straits between sleep and waking-- and what came of drinking oceans but a terrible thirst? Saltwater, mouthful after mouthful. Jakarta wasn't Fortaleza.

"It's nothing," says Arthur, instead. "Anyway, what about you?"

"What about me?" asks Eames.

"Why you're here, I mean," says Arthur. "Why you said yes."

Eames gives a quick shrug with one shoulder. "Same reason I got into this whole mess in the first place, I expect," he says. "Never knew when to leave things alone."

Arthur lets him prevaricate. Eames would present him with the truth sooner or later, wrapped up carefully in layers of artisan-grade bullshit, and Arthur would tear into the tissue paper like a famished Doberman going for a bone. They'd have plenty of time later for that song and dance.

"And you?" asks Eames.

 _And me_ , thinks Arthur. The mountainside below them falls away as they swing onto another stretch of road, chevron panels twisting past their line of sight. Fifteen years since he touched his first PASIV and woke up drenched in sweat, his blood so hot he could hear it singing in his ears, hopelessly in love. Fifteen years of respectability, making a name for himself.

"No one takes you seriously anymore unless you show up with a totem in your pocket," says Arthur. "Somewhere along the line, our dreams have started looking so much like waking that the biggest fucking concern we have is that we won't be able to tell them apart. We keep to our rules to keep ourselves safe. We've become bureaucrats, Eames. That's where we are now. If that's what it means to dream, then-- I guess I've come to kill it."

"Well," says Eames, having mulled over the word on his tongue, "let no one accuse you of being sentimental about your loves."

"Fifteen years was a good run," says Arthur, half to himself.

Eames glances out of the passenger window to check how high they've come, and as he turns his head, there's an instant -- bright and sharp as a dagger -- when Arthur catches the easy curve of his smile in the side mirror.

 

 

 

"Fear dream, didn't we say?" asks Eames, brushing aside a low branch. "Not a lot of it so far."

"It's my lucidity," says Arthur. "I'm much too used to controlling my own dreams, so the fear won't manifest in it at first exposure. Sorry, but this run is going to be pretty uneventful."

"Unless this is exactly what you're afraid of," says Eames. "Tranquil mountain roads and optimal driving conditions."

"The stuff of nightmares," says Arthur. "Everything seems good to go, doesn't it? No nausea, no paralysis. If aftereffects aren't an issue, we should be able to start the first round of trials for the volunteer patients right away. They'll take to the compound faster, you'll have all the harrowing anxiety dreams you could possibly want."

For a minute or two, they let the crunch of gravel under their feet fill the silence between them. _Scenic overlook_ , reads the sign pointing down the path. Eames is fidgeting with a handful of pine needles, presumably doing his level best to come up with as nonchalant a string of words as possible for what he wants to say. Arthur lets him get to it in his own time. In the end, Eames drops the pretense along with the shredded remnants of the needles.

"And then-- after that?" he asks. "What happens next? After we're done being guinea pigs, after this job is over, we become-- what?"

"By then we'll have our natural dreams back," says Arthur, "so we'd have to leave off thieving, I suppose. Hang up our hats. Go home."

"Where do you go when you go home?" asks Eames.

There's salt on the breeze; they're getting close. Arthur breathes it in, lets the taste settle low in his lungs.

"I'll have to figure that out," he says, "same as you."

They turn a corner and the woods spill open onto an ink-black crag, nothing else ahead but the sprawl of the ocean until it smudges into the grey horizon. It's like the rest of the continent has been torn away from the coastline. Arthur gathers his jacket around himself, charmed by the intractable view. The waves are just a distant murmur below them. He looks over the edge and the drop is dizzyingly sheer, five hundred feet straight down into the water, a curtain of bedrock. The gulls nesting in the cliffs are pinpricks of white.

"This isn't the fear, either," says Eames. "You're not afraid of heights."

"There's nothing to be afraid of," says Arthur, and hangs his foot past the lip of the rock, over the empty air, like testing if a step will hold him. "Maybe I'm afraid of how I get at heights," he says. Beneath the weight of his other sole, a bit of grit crumbles loose and plummets into the void. His pulse picks up. Five hundred feet of freefall, how sweet the sound.

"Arthur--" begins Eames.

Still with his foot poised over the edge, Arthur turns to look at him.

"It's nothing," says Eames, then he shakes his head. "No, it's not nothing. I--"

"Come on," says Arthur, because Eames's knuckles are tight and pale beneath the sleeves of his jacket. Something about the tension there thrills him.

Eames swallows, a rare graceless jerk of his chin.

"--How've you been?" he asks, softly, like too loud a noise might startle Arthur into falling, or send the whole cliff splintering into the ocean.

That wasn't the long way around; Arthur knows him well enough to tell the difference. That was everything Eames had been meaning to say, three words like a brush of skin, straining at the seams with what was crammed into it. Maybe years back, when he didn't know any better, he might have distrusted the charity of the question. Suspected there was a more barbed demand lying in wait for him, something hurt and ungainly, _Where the hell have you been for the last two years? Where did you go after LAX?_

But Eames never cared about the petty calculus of whatever this was between them, which was what made his question that much harder to answer. Arthur puts both his feet on solid ground and looks at the loose ends of Eames's scarf, silently counts the threads stirring there.

"I've been--" he begins, and doesn't want to lie to Eames.

If he doesn't answer, Eames will leave it at that. He knows. Eames will treat him with all the cordial familiarity appropriate to a sustained working relationship, split the bill with him on stakeouts, tease him when he winds himself up, hold the elevator for him, pass him the salt, never say a thing about what they've decided not to talk about, let Arthur keep him at arm's length without ever asking again.

That's what does it in the end, the thought that Eames would never ask again. A lick of sea-rough wind comes cresting over the edge of the bluffs, catches in Eames's scarf and turns it to a river. But the set of Eames's shoulders is locked too rigid beneath the cascade of fabric-- and Arthur realizes that Eames is holding his breath. _No, don't,_ Arthur wants to tell him. _My answer should never matter that much to you._ (Seven in the morning, barely awake, the scent of coffee curling into the corners of the Cobbs' living room.) Eames would be polite as anything if that was what Arthur wanted, staple his dossiers in the corners, keep his feet down off the desks. _But politeness isn't what I want from you,_ he thinks. He looks at Eames and it feels like five hundred feet of freefall, his heart too close to the open air. So he clears his throat as best as he can, offers Eames the closest thing to the truth he has, dragged out into the light from under his layers of industrial-grade refusal to look too closely at himself.

"I came here to bury Mal," he says.

 


End file.
